Reversing rural flight

• Source: Global Times
• [22:40 April 14 2009]
• Comments

By Lin Jiasi

He brought seeds from Beijing and taught farmers the most up-to-date planting and cultivation techniques.

Agriculture student intern Li Ma loved working the soil in a village farm in Inner Mongolia last year, a chance for him and his China Agricultural University chums to put a bit of pristine theory into smelly practice by conducting their own crop trials.

“I saw development progress in a rural area and had an opportunity to learn first hand the problems farmers were facing,” he says.

But Li, 23, is not going back. He can't afford it, he says.

“It's discouraging because the stipend our school provided was only enough to fund a small portion of our experiment,” he says.

Li’s story is not unique, by any measure. A survey by Guizhou University’s School of Agriculture in 2005, for instance, found that 95 percent of students majoring in agriculture had abandoned their chosen field upon graduation.

The university’s internship program is a neat start, says Professor Chen Baofeng, but China Agricultural University’s meagre resources cannot begin to turn the tide of talented graduates abandoning China’s suburban and rural hinterlands for life in the big city.

What Chen wants is for government to subsidize the travel expenses of students who dare to explore job
opportunities in more rural areas. “Not every student can afford to travel to the countryside,” he says. In fact, the best way to find a job in the countryside is to go to the countryside and ask around.

The need for subsidies to encourage students to return to the rural economy has long been recognized, acknowledges another professor at China Agricultural University.

“There’s barely any noticeable impact on rural development because the subsidy is still too little and only available to a few students,” says Professor Wu Laping.

China’s 200 million yuan agricultural implementation fund instead focuses on two programs: vocational skills training, and echnical, academic training for professionals

Those who join the skills training program tend to find part-time jobs as construction workers or housekeepers in the city. The technical trainees, on the other hand, receive a higher education in agricultural
studies, including agricultural science, technology, management and market development.

Agricultural technicians account for 0.3 percent of developed countries’ population, but only 0.01 percent of China’s. For a developed country with an advanced economy, this shortfall might be manageable. But for a nation of 900 million peasants, the need for qualified agricultural expertise probably cannot be overestimated.

Yet the state’s well-meaning implementation fund has so far failed to motivate those professional farming experts or China’s 470 million migrant workers to return to the Chinese countryside’s network of county towns and small cities.

The number of Agricultural Studies students has been declining in the last few years. Bai Jinming, Director-General of Department of Science, Technology & Education, Ministry of Agriculture, explained: “The problem with the education programs at agricultural schools is that they only provide a single training model, meaning students have no access to real life experience of the rural environment apart from their academic qualifications.”

That’s why so many students stay in the city, he says. It’s all they really know.

Despite its best efforts to boost the rural labor force in recent years, China’s rural anti-poverty program the Sunshine Project has not reversed the trend of workers staying on in the city. To control migration, China Agricultural University experts argue the government should speed up rural social development and improve living conditions simultaneously, aiming to reduce the urban-rural wealth and income gap.

“What the countryside really needs right now is a set of sustainable rural enterprise policies,” says Li. Policymakers must move beyond the single notion of education, argues Professor Chen, and invest more in human resource management, rural exploration and agricultural mechanization. Their aim should be to attract more professional people to the countryside by creating a networking platform to enhance market access for rural workers and professionals. Job opportunities remain limited in the countryside despite recent progress with village planning and the increasing pressures of urban and suburban development.

Kelvin Huang, a junior, comes from rural Fujian Province. He’s not going back, he says, because there’s simply no jobs back home for a qualified man like himself. On top of funding education and agricultural mechanization programs, Huang hopes the government will boost urbanization and propel the countryside
towards economic diversity and maturity.

“Even if the government provided the farmers with high-tech services, their living standards are still so lowthat they are not ready to switch to new technology.”